And then came Ursula’s interview: billed as ‘the inside story from Leonie Barratt’s real sister’. In fairness, Vee wasn’t the only one who got the hammer. Ursula, had looked sadly into the camera for some sub-David Bailey hack photographer who made her look overtired and over-madeup at the same time. It could have been deliberate, but if so, it was cruel. The journalist had been cruel, too, encouraging Ursula to talk about how the feminist movement had not only robbed her of a sister but robbed Leonie of peace of mind and the happy life she could have had.

‘People don’t die of a heart attack, grossly overweight and terribly lonely, for no reason,’ Ursula was quoted as saying, ‘I blame the choices my sister made. And I don’t mean overeating. Her so-called friends didn’t really support her, and Veronica Moon, who was supposed to be her best friend of all, watched her die for the sake of her own career. My poor sister Leonie was brainwashed by so-called feminists and she paid the price.’ The idea of Leonie being brainwashed was, theoretically, laughable, but Vee was empty of laughter. She was angry with Ursula, of course, but with the newspapers too, for encouraging her to leak her grief, to spill her story, to hurt herself, and Vee, and most of all, the memory of Leonie. How terrible for the most important thing about you to be the way you die. It added insult to the injury, so strongly felt by Vee now, that Leonie’s brilliance was never appreciated in her lifetime.

Editors called to cancel their commissions with her, just until things blew over, they said, but they never called again. Her wider circle of friends in the movement, too, got colder; or it could be that Vee had never been part of them, never more than a hanger-on. It could have been that, because she wouldn’t – couldn’t – talk about it, they thought she had something to hide, and the newspaper accounts of Leonie’s death were true.

She knew that in some quarters she had never been forgiven for photographing Thatcher, and that because she was successful, she seemed to be a sell-out. For all that Leonie had accused her of betraying her sisters, from time to time, it had been nothing more than provocation, really: a flexing of intellect, a poking at Vee to test that she was really solid, sound, a true sister. And Leonie never once gave her a hard time about earning good money, something Vee had always suspected was behind the hostility of some of the other women she knew in the movement. She had always been scrupulous about donating royalties to the causes she photographed, but that brought no warmth to some earth-mothers’ hearts.